You can curse the dead or pray for them, but don't expect them to do a thing for you. They're far too interested in watching us, to see what in heaven's name we will do next.

Empathy is really the opposite of spiritual meanness. It's the capacity to understand that every war is both won and lost. And that someone else's pain is as meaningful as your own.

We must surely appear to the world as exactly what we are: a nation that organizes its economy around consuming twice as much oil as it produces, and around the profligate wastefulness of the wars and campaigns required to defend such consumption. In recent years we have defined our national interest largely in terms of the oil fields and pipelines we need to procure fuel.

Sleeping alone seemed unnatural to me, and pitiful, something done in hospitals or when you're contagious.

If you want sweet dreams, you've got to live a sweet life.

I'm never going to tell the reader what to believe; I'm going to examine these characters that believe different ways, and examine their motives.

Perhaps growing up meant we put our knives away and feigned ignorance of the damage.